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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "deportation"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:34:22 PDTHow The FBI Has Been Working Hard To Deport Friends Of Guy They Killed During Interview About Boston BombingMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140310/17434526523/how-fbi-has-been-working-hard-to-deport-friends-guy-they-killed-during-interview-about-boston-bombing.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140310/17434526523/how-fbi-has-been-working-hard-to-deport-friends-guy-they-killed-during-interview-about-boston-bombing.shtmlthe FBI's killing of Ibragim Todashev along with a companion piece in Boston Magazine. You probably heard about the basics of the Todashev story. Todashev was a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers implicated in the Boston Marathon bombings (and the one who was killed when law enforcement tried to capture them), who was being interviewed by the FBI and was then shot multiple times and killed -- with a whole variety of conflicting stories coming out soon after as to what he did to lead to his death. One of the key stories was that Todashev had just admitted to participating, with Tsarnaev, in a grisly triple homicide outside of Boston a year and half earlier, and then supposedly lunged at the FBI agents (there were a variety of different reports, each claiming he had some kind of weapon, but each time the report differed on what kind of weapon). But reporter Susan Zalkind, who had been friendly with one of the 3 men killed back in 2011, which Todashev supposedly confessed to taking part in, decided to explore the story more deeply, and found a variety of oddities at every turn, nearly all of which involve strange moves by the FBI.

It's also impossible to listen to this story, without connecting it to some of the recent Snowden revelations concerning how the NSA and FBI act. While the various chapters of the story are all interesting (including Todashev's girlfriend who agreed to be interviewed by Zalkind, and a month or so later was deported, almost certainly because of the interview), perhaps the most striking is the story of Ashurmamad Miraliev, profiled in Act 2 of This American Life and written up in more detail by Zalkind last fall.

Miraliev was someone who lived in Florida and had become an acquaintance, but not a close friend, of Todashev. Months after Todashev was killed, Miraliev was pulled over and arrested, supposedly for having an expired license (it had expired a week or so earlier). He was then interrogated for six hours by the FBI (without a lawyer) -- almost all about Todashev, asking specific questions about the triple homicide and Todashev's involvement (remember, this is supposedly well after the FBI claims Todashev confessed to those murders). Miraliev pointed out that he wasn't that close to Todashev, that he'd never been to Massachusetts, and that all of that happened well before he'd ever met Todashev. He then asked to be let go, and was told that he was being thrown in jail based on absolutely ridiculous trumped up charges that are way too convoluted to fully cover here, but the short version is that a year earlier, Miraliev had apparently gotten into a yelling altercation with a guy who Todashev had fought with, and the feds (a year later) had pressured the guy Todashev fought with to press charges, and then claimed that Miraliev was "witness tampering" for that screaming match. The charges were later dropped after a judge pointed out how ridiculous they were -- but the whole thing still got Miraliev put on a terrorist watch list, caused him to miss a court date for his student visa, and got him kicked out of the country:

So the FBI had been matchmaking: They had helped the sheriff’s department go fishing on a long-closed case to find a victim and a charge with which they could pressure or detain first Ibragim, and later Ashurmamad. The witness-tampering charge the FBI brought against Ashurmamad was so flimsy that it was dropped in just a month.

And yet it didn’t matter. Although he had never been to Boston and never met the Tsarnaevs, Ashurmamad was nonetheless flagged—according to a note on the booking sheet—“ON TERRORIST WATCH LIST/PLACED PROTECTIVE CUSTODY AND HIGH RISK. HOUSE ALONE.” Ashurmamad was taken from the Orlando Police Department to the Osceola County jail, where he was kept alone in an 8-by-10 room. To meet with his lawyers, he had to have his hands and wrists shackled and be chained to the ground. Ashurmamad told me there were no windows, the light was always on, and he was always cold. He was there for a month until the tampering case was dropped. But he wasn’t released. His student visa had expired, and he’d missed a court date while he was in jail. So he was moved directly to an immigration detention facility, and on November 4, he was ordered to be deported back to Tajikistan.

Hearing the original story, and reading through the details, I'm further reminded of the stories of how the NSA, FBI and others in the federal government use "parallel construction" to build questionable cases against individuals they want dealt with.

The whole story highlights, yet again, why anyone who claims "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear," are simply wrong. Miraliev did not appear to do anything "wrong" other than failing to reregister his driver's license on time. But, because the FBI wanted to pressure and then punish him, to give them information they didn't have supposedly to confirm a murder which the FBI itself claims they had already solved, suddenly he got kicked out of the country entirely, losing everything he had (he lost his home, his money and car, which were all left in the US when he got sent back to Tajikistan).

While Zalkind presents a plausible theory on what may have happened with the FBI and Todashev, the hiding of information, the coverup and the continued efforts to bully, threaten, harass and (eventually) deport a number of his friends is quite shocking. One former law enforcement official quoted in the show, notes that when your job is to stop terrorism, these kinds of actions seem perfectly reasonable. Even if you have no proof, you just want anyone who knew anyone to be gone, so they're not your problem. It's entirely possible that's what's going on, and no one seems to care about punishing perfectly innocent people.

But if you actually believed the crap that the NSA and FBI have been saying about only targeting real threats to national security, and not putting innocent people at risk, take a listen or read the writeup. It presents a very different picture than one of an FBI protecting the country. It suggests a bunch of thuggish bullies who went too far, and are now doing everything possible to cover their tracks.

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]]>parallel-constructionhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140310/17434526523Wed, 9 Oct 2013 05:23:26 PDTThe DHS Has Been Using A Fake Mexican Constitution Article To Deport US Citizens For 35 YearsTim Cushinghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131008/10261124794/dhs-has-been-using-fake-mexican-constitution-article-to-deport-us-citizens-35-years.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131008/10261124794/dhs-has-been-using-fake-mexican-constitution-article-to-deport-us-citizens-35-years.shtml
We're used to our government's security and intelligence agencies telling lies in order to justify their actions. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has achieved a sort of infamy for his "least untruthful answer" in response to questioning. (Not that this infamy has cost him his job…) Others have performed linguistic aerobics ("not under this program," "relevant to…") to stretch the truth just enough to give their activities a thin veneer of legitimacy.

For more than two decades, Sigifredo Saldana Iracheta insisted he was a U.S. citizen, repeatedly explaining to immigration officials that he was born to an American father and a Mexican mother in a city just south of the Texas border.

Year after year, the federal government rejected his claims, deporting him at least four times and at one point detaining him for nearly two years as he sought permission to join his wife and three children in South Texas.

In rejecting Saldana's bid for citizenship, the government sought to apply an old law that cited Article 314 of the Mexican Constitution, which supposedly dealt with legitimizing out-of-wedlock births. But there was a problem: The Mexican Constitution has no such article.

NPR calls it an "error." Jeff Gamso, public defender and former criminal defense lawyer, calls it something else.

Our government's been lying to the courts about this since at least 1978 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service first invented Article 314 of the Mexican Constitution as a convenient way to deny citizenship to and thus deport American citizens.

The opinion from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals isn't as generous as NPR, either.

DHS officers and the Administrative Appeals Office (“AAO”) within DHS have relied on provisions of the Mexican Constitution that either never existed or do not say what DHS claims they say.

The DHS, however, was very generous towards its previously uninterrupted 35-year exploitation of a non-existent constitutional article.

Saldana's case was finally resolved earlier this month, when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the government's explanation of a "typo" and ruled that he had been a citizen since birth.

A "typo." That sounds familiar. The NSA used the same excuse for its collection of tons of domestic data when it claimed analysts accidentally entered US area codes rather than codes tied to foreign countries. It was a "typo," and the DHS never bothered to correct it for 35 years and then only because it was called out by a federal court.

And this isn't the only lie/error in the DHS' case. It also pointed to another article of the Mexican Constitution to deny Saldana's claims of citizenship -- Article 130. Fortunately, for the DHS, this article actually exists. Unfortunately for its hopes of barring Saldana from the country for the fifth time, what it says isn't anywhere near what is claimed.

The AAO also cited Article 130 of the Constitution of Mexico for the same proposition that the Constitution requires that parents be married in order for children to be legitimated. However, Article 130 provides only that marriage is a civil contract, as opposed to a religious one, and says nothing about legitimation or children.

Why would the government repeatedly lie in order to prosecute and deport legal US citizens? Gamso answers this question very succinctly.

Because it can.

It got away with this one for 35 years. Why should it stop? Three-and-a-half decades of reliance on a wholly fabricated article of a constitution it (correctly) assumed no one would actually bother looking up. In retrospect, it seems audacious. But the reality of the situation is that the government got away with a lie for more than three decades and that fact alone is enough to encourage it to deploy useful lies in any situation where it thinks misstating the facts will give it an edge or help it achieve its aims.

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]]>every-deportation-justifies-the-liehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20131008/10261124794Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:34:00 PDTAs Feds Drop Bogus Domain Seizure Cases, Another Site Admin Held Without Bail And About To Be DeportedMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120831/08112120229/as-feds-drop-bogus-domain-seizure-cases-another-site-admin-held-without-bail-about-to-be-deported.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120831/08112120229/as-feds-drop-bogus-domain-seizure-cases-another-site-admin-held-without-bail-about-to-be-deported.shtmlDajaz1 and Rojadirecta have shown that the US government wants nothing to do with lawsuits around domain seizures when those sites lawyer up with strong legal teams, it has continued to railroad those with less-than-stellar legal support. We saw it with NinjaVideo where it was clear that the defendants did not have particularly strong legal advice, and because of that were pretty much forced into plea bargains. And, now, the same basic thing appears to have happened with a guy named Yonjo Quiroa, who had nine different sites that ICE seized in January of this year. They arrested Quiroa in February, and he's not only been held without bail since then, but he's now done a plea bargain in which he's pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, expecting to get 6 to 12 months in jail (remember, he's already been there for 7 months) and will then be "removed from the United States."

From the letter his lawyers sent on his behalf to the court, it's clear that Quiroa was given a public defender. There certainly could be differences between his case and others, but the differences between the cases where sites had well-known, widely respected litigators, and those where they did not, is pretty stark. Of course, the feds understand this and use it to their advantage in pushing those they've gone after into plea bargain deals. Now, don't be surprised when ICE's John Morton starts using the case of Quiroa as an "example" of all the great successes they've had in seizing websites...

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]]>the-importance-of-good-legal-helphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120831/08112120229Wed, 4 Jan 2012 13:10:29 PSTICE Mistakenly Deports Missing Teen To ColombiaMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/11012117278/ice-mistakenly-deports-missing-teen-to-colombia.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/11012117278/ice-mistakenly-deports-missing-teen-to-colombia.shtmlcensoring websites, such as the case of Dajaz1.com. As we've noted in the past, the details of that operation showed an organization that didn't really understand what it was doing, and definitely seemed to believe in "shoot first, ask questions later."

As many people have pointed out, why is "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" doing anything involving the internet or copyrights/trademarks online? So perhaps you could "excuse" their vast mistakes as them being out of their depth.

But what about the part of their mandate that they're actually supposed to be experts in? You know, keeping people who don't belong here out? Yeah, it appears they approach that with about the same level of detail awareness as when they deal with censoring blogs. In 2010, 14-year-old Jakadrien Turner ran away from home, "distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents' divorce." Her grandmother searched for her with no luck... until now. It seems that at some point in 2010 Jakadrien was arrested for shoplifting. She gave police a fake name... and that name apparently was the same as an illegal immigrant who was wanted in Colombia. And, that was enough to get the girl deported to Colombia last April. She remains there, currently detained by the Colombian government.

Apparently ICE took the girl's fingerprints "but somehow didn't confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her." They've since taken her back into custody, since it was discovered she wasn't who they thought she was. ICE now says that they're "fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case." Perhaps -- and this is just a suggestion -- ICE should start "fully and immediately investigating" stuff before they go around creating new and bigger problems...